For
our regular first-Tuesday workday in April, the Garber Park Stewards
and our Botanist, Lech Naumovich, were happy to host about 20 Head Royce
seventh graders and their instructors, and happier still to extract from
them two hours of labor in the meadow pulling cape ivy. We set up
three work sites with tarps for collecting the pulled stems, and we
stood back and let them at it. They pulled and pulled, found a newt, pulled some more, and
had a contest to see who could pull the longest stem, and pulled some
more, and bagged the piles of stems, and carried the bags to our
collection point.
They also found out that the cape ivy in the meadow
covered up a lot of things including lots of blackberry plants, both
native and Himalayan--they both have thorns--and stinging nettles, and
giant vetch which is in bloom right now, and lots of oddly segmented
horsetails just high enough now to assess how high they will have to get
in order to rule the meadow this summer. Six feet probably. In the
end 20 Head Royce seventh graders can make quite a dent in cape ivy. We had fun, we pulled cape ivy, and we want those seventh graders back for an encore performance. There are still great expanses of cape ivy left to vanquish. For more pictures click here.
